How to hire a Head of Growth in the UK, fractional or full time
Hiring a fractional Growth Lead in the UK takes seven steps: write the gap down, set the budget from the published day-rate band, check fractional is the right shape, shortlist people who have held the seat at your stage, interview with the six questions below, agree the day-ninety markers in writing, and contract the days and the IR35 position. Most companies go from brief to signed contract in about two weeks. To skip the reading and meet people, hire a fractional Growth Lead from the seat page.
UK day rates for the seat run £600 to £1,100. All eleven seats compared →
Fractional or full time: which Growth Lead hire you need
A fractional Growth Lead costs £600 to £1,100 a day, usually two days a week, which is £4,600 to £8,433 a month with no employer costs. A full-time Growth Lead is a salary plus employer National Insurance and pension, and a retained search adds 25 to 33 per cent of first-year earnings. Fractional fits two or three days of judgement; full time fits five days of leadership.
| Route | Cost basis | Time to start | Commitment | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fractional | £600 to £1,100 a day; £4,600 to £8,433 a month at two days | Met within days, starting in one to three weeks | One to three days a week, usually a month's notice | Owning the Growth Lead decisions two or three days a week |
| Interim | £11,500 to £21,083 a month at 5 days | Weeks rather than months | Full time for a fixed term, typically 3 to 9 months | Cover for a departure, a transaction or a turnaround with an end date |
| Full-time search | A salary plus employer costs, and 25 to 33 per cent of year one as the search fee | eight to twelve weeks of search, then three to six months of notice | Permanent and employed, five days a week | A five-day seat that is certain to be permanent |
The difference between the three routes is set out in full on fractional versus interim versus full-time, and hiring a full-time executive covers the permanent route.
Hiring a fractional Growth Lead in seven steps
- Write the gap down. Name the two or three things a fractional Growth Lead must own in the first quarter, and how many days a week that is. Put your real numbers in the brief: monthly sign-ups, activation rate, month-one retention, even if they are rough and even if they embarrass you. Good candidates propose sharper work against real numbers, and the bench has seen worse than yours. Below ↓
- Set the budget from the published band. UK fractional Growth Lead day rates run £600 to £1,100 in 2026. Two days a week is £4,600 to £8,433 a month, with no employer costs on top. Fractional Growth Lead cost →
- Check fractional is the right shape. A fractional Growth Lead is two or three days a week for a year or more. If the need is five days for six months, or the seat is a full-time job already, interim or permanent fits better. Below ↓
- Shortlist people who have held the seat at your stage. Read track records, not titles. The right operator has been the Growth Lead at a company of your size and stage before, and says what happened there in numbers. Browse the bench →
- Interview with the six questions. Every question asks for something that happened. An operator who has held the seat answers from memory; one who has advised from the sidelines answers in the abstract. Below ↓
- Agree the day-ninety markers in writing. Put the day-ninety outcomes in the brief before they start. Measurement you can trust: one funnel dashboard with agreed metric definitions, and the known gaps in the data written down rather than glossed over. Below ↓
- Contract the days, the notice period and the IR35 position. Fix the days a week, a notice period of a month, who owns the output, and the IR35 determination. Then set the start date and the first ninety-day review. IR35 for fractional executives →
What the seat covers is on the fractional Growth Lead page. The rest of this page is the part that usually goes unwritten: the interview, day ninety, and when this hire is the wrong answer entirely.
Where to find a fractional Growth Lead in the UK
Four routes work, and most companies use two of them at once. Whichever finds the person, the shortlist test is the same: they have held the seat at a company of your size and stage before.
- A platform or bench with the rate on the profile. The day rate is visible before the first call, which settles the budget conversation early. The UK fractional platforms, compared.
- A search against a written brief. Somebody else runs the longlist and the first interviews and puts a shortlist in front of you. How Operator Search works.
- Your investors, accountant or lawyer. They have seen fractional growth leads work at other companies and know which ones they would have back.
- Other founders. A Growth Lead who has done it at a company like yours is usually two introductions away. Ask what they would hire them for again, not whether they were good.
Six questions to ask, and what a strong answer sounds like
Every question here asks for something that happened, not something they believe. An operator who has genuinely held the seat answers from memory; one who has advised from the sidelines answers in the abstract, and the difference is audible within a minute.
1. Say we get a thousand visits a month, forty sign-ups, and six of them pay. Where do you look first?
Listen for: Strong candidates go downstream first: what the six who paid did differently, what week-one retention looks like, whether the leak is activation. Weak ones start rewriting the landing page, which is the smallest number on the board.
2. What is your kill rule? How do you decide an experiment is dead?
Listen for: You want preset bounds: a sample size or a time box agreed before launch, and examples of pulling the plug on their own idea. Anyone who runs tests until they feel done is shopping for the answer they wanted.
3. What is the smallest improvement you have measured that you were confident was real?
Listen for: The question is a trap for exaggerators. Strong answers get smaller and more careful: a few points of activation, held across cohorts, checked against seasonality. Weak answers are large round uplifts with no baseline and no control.
4. Tell me about an attribution mess you inherited. What did you end up trusting?
Listen for: Good operators are openly pragmatic here: triangulating self-reported attribution against platform data, accepting that some channels cannot be measured cleanly. Anyone claiming a tool solved attribution for them has not looked closely at what it was reporting.
5. Which of your experiments changed the product rather than the marketing?
Listen for: The strong answer involves onboarding, pricing or an in-product moment, shipped with engineers, measured on retention. If every example lives in the ad account or on landing pages, you are talking to a paid media specialist wearing a growth title.
6. If our cost per acquisition doubled next month, what would your first week look like?
Listen for: Listen for economics by channel: which spend gets cut on what evidence, what payback period they hold spend to, what they check before touching anything. A weak answer jumps straight to diversifying channels, which is spending more to learn less.
Red flags
- Quotes uplift percentages from past roles with no baseline, sample size or timeframe attached. Real experimenters volunteer the caveats before you ask.
- The proposed plan is a list of channel tactics with nothing about activation or retention. That is a media plan, and it will pour more water into the same leaking bucket.
- Every experiment they describe worked. A genuine testing programme fails most of the time, so a perfect record means either a short memory or very few real tests.
- Presents what worked at their last company as directly portable to yours, before asking whether your motion, price point or buyer looks anything like theirs.
What day ninety should look like
Agree these before they start, in writing, in the brief. A fractional engagement without a ninety-day marker drifts into a retainer nobody remembers the point of.
- Measurement you can trust: one funnel dashboard with agreed metric definitions, and the known gaps in the data written down rather than glossed over.
- At least six experiments run with success criteria set before launch, each written up, failures included. The write-ups are the asset that outlasts the engagement.
- The biggest leak in the funnel named, with a number on what it costs you, and at least one shipped fix already being measured against it.
When a fractional Growth Lead is the wrong answer
- You are pre product-market fit with a handful of users. There is nothing to optimise and no volume to test against. The work at that stage is talking to customers, and it is founder work, not a hire.
- Engineering cannot ship anything for the next quarter. Growth experiments queue behind the roadmap and die there. Fix the capacity first or the engagement burns money waiting.
- One proven channel works and you simply want more of it. A channel specialist or an agency will scale it cheaper. Growth leads earn their rate on problems that cut across the funnel, not on volume in a solved channel.
If one of those is you, say so in a brief anyway and we will tell you straight. Sometimes the honest answer is interim or full-time.
What to put in a fractional Growth Lead brief
- Put your real numbers in the brief: monthly sign-ups, activation rate, month-one retention, even if they are rough and even if they embarrass you. Good candidates propose sharper work against real numbers, and the bench has seen worse than yours.
- State the engineering capacity they get, in concrete terms: days per sprint or a named developer. This is the first thing a serious growth operator asks, and "we'll figure it out" reads as no.
- The thing founders always forget: name the decision rights over live surfaces. Can they change onboarding, pricing page copy, or pause a channel without a sign-off queue? An operator who needs three approvals per test will run four experiments a quarter and you will both call it a failure.
What the contract should cover
General guidance rather than legal advice: have the engagement letter read by somebody who acts for you. These are the clauses that cause the arguments when they are missing.
- The days. How many a week or a month, whether they roll over, and the day rate or monthly figure that pays for them.
- Notice. A month either way is the usual term, long enough to hand over and short enough that neither side is trapped.
- Intellectual property. Who owns the models, documents and code the Growth Lead produces. It should be the company, said in writing, because without a clause it may not be.
- IR35. Whether the engagement is inside or outside, who made the determination, and the reasons. IR35 for fractional executives explains who carries the decision.
The rest, from confidentiality to conversion terms, is in what a fractional executive contract should say.
Common questions about hiring a fractional Growth Lead
How quickly can a company hire a fractional Growth Lead?
Faster than any other way of filling the seat. A request to a fractional Growth Lead on the bench is accepted or declined within three days, and a brief to Operator Search returns a shortlist in five business days. A permanent Growth Lead search runs eight to twelve weeks to an accepted offer and then a notice period of three to six months, which is why fractional cover is the normal bridge.
How many days a week should a fractional Growth Lead be hired for?
Two is the most common arrangement and one to three is the working range. Below a day a week nobody can own a function; above three the seat has usually become a full-time one and the honest conversation is about converting. Start at the lower end and add a day when decisions begin queueing for the Growth Lead's days.
What is the monthly cost of a fractional Growth Lead two days a week?
At the 2026 UK band of £600 to £1,100 a day, two days a week over 46 working weeks comes to £4,600 to £8,433 a month, invoiced by the operator's own company with no employer National Insurance, pension or recruitment fee on top. Higher end for marketplaces, subscription products and anything with a complex funnel.
Can a fractional Growth Lead later become the full-time Growth Lead?
Yes, and it is one of the better routes to a permanent hire because both sides have had months of working interview. Raise the possibility early so the operator can plan their other clients, agree a start date around their notice to those clients, and check the engagement letter for any conversion terms before the conversation.
What should a brief for a fractional Growth Lead say?
The three outcomes the seat owns in the first ninety days, the days a week and whether on site matters, who the Growth Lead reports to and who reports to them, the systems and data they will inherit, and the budget as a day rate or a monthly figure. A brief that lists tasks rather than outcomes attracts people who want a to-do list, and the fractional growth leads worth hiring decline it.
When should a company hire a full-time Growth Lead?
When the work fills five days and stays there: decisions queue for the Growth Lead's days every week, there is a team of leaders to manage, and the role is certain to be permanent. A retained search for the seat runs 25 to 33 per cent of first-year earnings. Until all three are true, a fractional Growth Lead at two days a week is the cheaper way to find out.
How long does it take to hire a Growth Lead, fractional or full time?
A fractional Growth Lead is usually met within days and starts in one to three weeks: Operator Search returns a shortlist in 5 business days, and a request on the bench is answered within three. A permanent Growth Lead takes eight to twelve weeks of search to an accepted offer, then a notice period of three to six months, so a first day is usually six months or more away.
How do I find a part-time Growth Lead?
Four routes work in the UK: a fractional platform or bench where the day rate is published before you speak to anybody, a search run against a written brief, a referral from an investor, accountant or another founder, and the Growth Lead's own network of former colleagues. Whichever route, shortlist people who have held the seat at your stage, and agree the days, the notice period and the IR35 position in writing.
Two ways in
Browse verified fractional growth leads on the bench and book direct, or brief Operator Search and we run the interviews above for you.